But in research published Thursday by the London School of Economics, two leading British economists say there are good reasons to doubt that real wages will pick up any time soon. One of the authors, David Blanchflower, is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., and a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. The other, Stephen Machin. is a professor of economics at University College London and a member of the Low Pay Commission.

They say that since there is no sign yet of a pickup in productivity growth from the very low levels that have persisted since the 2008 financial crisis, there is little room for wages to rise. Moreover, since the U.K.’s unemployment rate didn’t increase a lot during the post-crisis recession, the dynamics of the jobs market don’t point to significant wage hikes.

Added to those, more fundamental forces, are the fact that pay for government workers has been frozen as part of the continuing austerity program, which has another four to five years to run, and is likely to involve more job cuts.

“It is quite clear that the economy is still well below full employment and there is a large amount of slack in the labour market,” the two economists write. “We see little evidence of widespread skill shortages, which would push up wages; and public sector pay freezes with continuing redundancies continue to push down on workers’ bargaining power.”

The BOE is paying close to attention to a wide variety of indicators of slack in the jobs market to gauge the appropriate time for it to begin to raise its benchmark interest rate. A pickup in wage growth would be a sure sign that spare capacity has been exhausted, and interest rates should start to move higher.

If Mr. Blanchflower and Mr. Machin are right, however, the BOE will be waiting a long time for that signal to arrive. They also argue that even if average wages were to pick up, most Britons would likely not see much benefit, such has been the rise of income inequality over recent decades.

“Median wages seem to have become ‘decoupled’ from productivity growth because of rising inequality, which means that a growing share of the value from productivity growth is absorbed by pensions and higher salaries for top earner, ” they wrote.

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